WEBVTT NOTE Transcript 2025-09-09 from FLAC by https://elvery.net/prototypes/transcribe/ on my MacBook Air M1 on maximum quality setting. NOTE Body significantly edited. 00:00.000 --> 00:08.000 So we've now had our solar system installed - solar as in PV - on our roof. 00:08.000 --> 00:12.000 We've got some actual numbers, which we didn't have a year ago. 00:12.000 --> 00:19.000 And why did we do this? Well, we wanted to again reduce bills. 00:19.000 --> 00:29.000 We could reduce our CO2 emissions and reduce our gas bill as well, both for water of course. 00:29.000 --> 00:33.000 We thought it was worth a look. This is after we had that journey. 00:33.000 --> 00:38.000 We went through that exercise of looking at all the things we could do on the house 00:38.000 --> 00:41.000 and decided that solar PV was an easy win. 00:41.000 --> 00:46.000 It was relatively inexpensive. It wasn't too disruptive to the house. 00:46.000 --> 00:51.000 Bearing in mind that since we've bought the house we've put some engineering flooring down. 00:51.000 --> 00:55.000 We've got carpets. It's decorated. Not saying it's perfection. 00:55.000 --> 01:02.000 But if we were to do major works now we would be undoing all the good things we've already done. 01:02.000 --> 01:08.000 I should add, prompted by Dan's talk, I said it was four hours to put solar panels in. 01:08.000 --> 01:12.000 Yes it was, but the scaffolding had already been put up outside the house. 01:12.000 --> 01:17.000 It wasn't four hours in total. But that was done as a separate activity. 01:17.000 --> 01:22.000 So we thought "It's worth a look". We did exactly what Dan said. 01:22.000 --> 01:30.000 We got about six quotes from relatively local-to-us installers in Kingston. 01:30.000 --> 01:38.000 We used a mixture of word-of-mouth recommendation and I actually went to Which? 01:38.000 --> 01:44.000 It happens I subscribe to Which?. I'm not so certain about some of its reviews. 01:44.000 --> 01:47.000 But they've got a list of trusted traders. 01:47.000 --> 01:54.000 We'd had some, I shouldn't be saying this, but we had one or two nasty experiences with Checkatrade 01:54.000 --> 02:03.000 rated or qualified traders. So we weren't very happy with one or two of those. 02:03.000 --> 02:11.000 We got our fingers burnt, not quite literally. Anyway, so yeah, a combination of both. 02:11.000 --> 02:16.000 We got some quotes. Many of these companies will not visit your house. They'll give you a quote, 02:16.000 --> 02:24.000 but they won't necessarily turn up at your property. They'll do it from using Google Earth and other facts 02:24.000 --> 02:30.000 and just give you a number based on roof size. So be aware of that. 02:30.000 --> 02:37.000 Our goal was with a budget. We actually did this unlike some installers, sorry, some installations. 02:37.000 --> 02:41.000 Sorry I'm jumping around, but I've been triggered by a few of the comments. 02:41.000 --> 02:46.000 We set ourselves a budget. We said "We're going to spend no more than this amount of money." 02:46.000 --> 02:49.000 "What can we get?"  Where some people may do it the other way around. 02:49.000 --> 02:56.000 I feel Dan's done it where he's wanted the best system he could have for his property. 02:56.000 --> 03:01.000 Whereas we actually capped it up front. We said "We've only got this amount of money." 03:01.000 --> 03:09.000 And then we went to these installers and said, "What sort of system can we get today with this sum?" 03:09.000 --> 03:17.000 "How do we trade off the battery, number of other panels, how much energy will we get from that?" 03:17.000 --> 03:22.000 And that's how we did this. As I already mentioned, we wanted a battery. 03:22.000 --> 03:25.000 We thought that was going to be important, particularly for the winter months. 03:25.000 --> 03:36.000 And we capture reduced energy costs electricity at night during the winter and fill our battery up. 03:36.000 --> 03:39.000 Our battery's possibly a bit under-sized. 03:39.000 --> 03:46.000 We also added electric water heating as a last minute feature, including a solar diverter. 03:46.000 --> 03:51.000 We can talk about that in a moment. All these things I've been talking about with others. 03:51.000 --> 03:56.000 Others have talked about suitability of roof, slates, directions, structures. 03:56.000 --> 04:04.000 We've now got a brilliant roof in so far as the amount of available south-facing roof space on our roof isn't great. 04:04.000 --> 04:08.000 So we looked at this 20 years ago and everyone said, well, they're not worth doing. 04:08.000 --> 04:16.000 But in the interim 20 years, panels have got much more efficient. They're much, much cheaper. 04:16.000 --> 04:21.000 So it's a slightly different position today. 04:21.000 --> 04:28.000 We've gone through the battery storing inside, outside. There's actually a specific regulation. 04:28.000 --> 04:33.000 It's not a regulation, so it's not mandatory, as I would call it. 04:33.000 --> 04:44.000 But there is a document that's referred here that actually gives guidance on where batteries are in home use of energy storage, 04:44.000 --> 04:48.000 where they should go. So this is not complete. 04:48.000 --> 04:52.000 So that's what we've got. That's what we've effectively got. 04:52.000 --> 04:57.000 We've got 12 panels, 5 kilowatt peak capacity. 04:57.000 --> 05:04.000 We've got a 9 kilowatt-hour battery and charger. 05:04.000 --> 05:07.000 And actually, that's the point Damon mentioned. 05:07.000 --> 05:11.000 You've got to be a bit careful - when we had our system put in place, 05:11.000 --> 05:17.000 I said, say we want to run our washing machine and we want to run the kettle at the same time, 05:17.000 --> 05:23.000 because there is a limit to what your inverter will enable. 05:23.000 --> 05:31.000 And we went slightly upsized. We've got a 5 kilowatt capable device. 05:31.000 --> 05:39.000 So we can provide, as we understand it, 5 kilowatts into the house from our battery. 05:39.000 --> 05:44.000 If you don't look at that, you might find you can't do what I've just described. 05:44.000 --> 05:48.000 You can't power two large appliances at the same time. 05:48.000 --> 05:51.000 You should be clear out there. That doesn't mean the lights will go out. 05:51.000 --> 05:53.000 It simply means you import a little bit from the grid. 05:53.000 --> 05:57.000 Yeah, it means you've got less of your own stored energy being used, 05:57.000 --> 06:04.000 and more, as Damon rightly points out, more energy coming through your conventional electricity meter. 06:04.000 --> 06:13.000 We've got this myenergi eddi power diverter, which feeds an old-fashioned cylinder in our case. 06:13.000 --> 06:18.000 We haven't replaced our cylinder. We haven't replaced the immersion heater. 06:18.000 --> 06:21.000 We can talk a tiny bit about that too. 06:21.000 --> 06:27.000 But this is what the panels look like. That's a group of three panels on the front, south-facing. 06:27.000 --> 06:32.000 And we've got another single panel on this face of the roof here. 06:32.000 --> 06:39.000 And then we've got eight panels on the other face of our roof, total of 12. 06:39.000 --> 06:47.000 Two separate pictures. Well, that's our rather busy consumer unit arranged with smart meter. 06:47.000 --> 06:58.000 That's the smart meter. That's the fuse (isolator) for the solar components. 06:58.000 --> 07:04.000 And in our garage by the door by the fire extinguisher in fact, we've got our battery pack, 07:04.000 --> 07:10.000 which is a Fox made by company Fox. And then we've got the charger-inverter. 07:10.000 --> 07:17.000 One unusual thing, relatively unusual, we've got per panel an inverter. 07:17.000 --> 07:27.000 Typically, some PV systems have an inverter that takes what they call a string of panels, 07:27.000 --> 07:32.000 and maybe an inverter will have two strings of six panels. 07:32.000 --> 07:40.000 Because we've got our panels split across three roofs, we've actually got individual inverters on every panel. 07:40.000 --> 07:43.000 That's the best you can have in today's technology. 07:43.000 --> 07:51.000 It means that any shading or problem with an individual panel doesn't affect the other panel. 07:51.000 --> 07:56.000 You can also look at the performance of the individual panels. 07:56.000 --> 07:58.000 So it's quite good. You pay a little bit more for that. 07:58.000 --> 08:05.000 You might ask how much more - I don't know precisely - but maybe a 10% hit, let's say, on price, 08:05.000 --> 08:11.000 to have that individual panel inverter technology. But I think it's worth having. 08:11.000 --> 08:17.000 Our battery is probably a bit undersized from what we've sort of gleaned during the year. 08:17.000 --> 08:25.000 So it's rather small I'm afraid. In fact, I think if I just move on to the next, there's total here. 08:25.000 --> 08:32.000 Some of you may be concerned about actual numbers in terms of saving, and there's a column on the right giving you some ideas. 08:32.000 --> 08:41.000 But we've got to be very careful. In our one year of ownership, we've generated 4.3 megawatt-hours of electricity. 08:41.000 --> 08:48.000 Now, we're probably running. We don't know precisely. Maybe I should know, but I don't know. 08:48.000 --> 08:53.000 We're probably now down to about 5 megawatt [hours]. Those who heard my earlier talk. 08:53.000 --> 08:59.000 We're probably using about 5 megawatt-hours of electricity a year if we didn't have solar. 08:59.000 --> 09:09.000 But in spite of having solar, we've only used 2.8 megawatt-hours of the solar components. 09:09.000 --> 09:14.000 We've actually got surplus that we were not able to use during the year. 09:14.000 --> 09:23.000 So that extra 1.5 megawatt-hours, which is in the second line, that got exported back to our energy supplier Octopus. 09:23.000 --> 09:29.000 Now, you don't get very much for that today. You only get about 15 pence per [kilowatt-hour]... 09:29.000 --> 09:34.000 They're not, you know, maybe seems to be interested per se in that going back. 09:34.000 --> 09:38.000 We would have been better off using it ourselves if we could. 09:38.000 --> 09:44.000 But we were either not in the house when the sun was out and we were generating, 09:44.000 --> 09:53.000 or we've not got a big enough battery such that we could capture some of that, or millions of variations, some of these. 09:53.000 --> 10:03.000 We don't have an electric hob. So when we've got a frying pan on, we're not using that energy that we might have otherwise used. 10:03.000 --> 10:14.000 So the other thing is our hot water regime, that use of our existing cylinder, old fashioned immersion heater, 10:14.000 --> 10:21.000 we are not getting much energy into that by observation of the app that we've got for managing that. 10:21.000 --> 10:26.000 What I'm saying is, if you want to heat your hot water using solar, 10:26.000 --> 10:33.000 you probably need to install a new brand new super duper cylinder with optimised, you know, 10:33.000 --> 10:39.000 element placement and so on. Even then, you're not going to make huge savings, but it would be more so. 10:39.000 --> 10:49.000 So we've clearly saved some money. If you could use all of it, you could maybe save £1100 in actual bill terms. 10:49.000 --> 10:53.000 But we didn't save £1100 because we didn't use all of it. 10:53.000 --> 10:57.000 We could compute the amount of actually saved from the export. 10:57.000 --> 11:03.000 But we've clearly saved money and used a large chunk of that solar energy that we've produced. 11:03.000 --> 11:11.000 We've produced more than we thought we would, considering our slightly crazy roof shape. 11:11.000 --> 11:15.000 So we think it's been quite good. 11:15.000 --> 11:20.340 [APPLAUSE]